The Wanting

by Campbell Armstrong

  She drew away from him. She sat down on the bed, taking off her boots.

  Her perfume, the fragrance of lemon, assailed him.

  “You almost gave me a heart attack,” he said.

  Connie smiled. “In the restaurant, you mean?”

  “You know what I mean.”

  “Ah,” she said. She kicked the boots across the room and laughed. “I don’t give up easily. I stick to things. I have a stubborn streak this wide,” and she spread her hands like an angler indicating the size of the one that got away.”

  “It wasn’t a judicious thing to do, Connie. What the hell are you doing here?” Judicious—what kind of word was that? He gazed at her bare legs, at how shadows formed in her thighs. “First you call me. Next thing, you show up in Carnarvon. How in God’s name am I supposed to explain all that to my wife?”

  “She probably imagines we’re having an affair,” Connie Harrison said, her voice filled with mock innocence. She lay back. She was wearing nothing under her mini-skirt. Max had to look elsewhere for a moment, even as he was conscious of how she was spreading her legs and allowing her fingers to rest against her thighs. What are you here for, Max? he asked himself. To end this nefarious business? Or to make love to this woman?

  “I’m amazed by your cunning,” he said. “What do you really want? You’d like me to leave my family? Throw everything up for you?”

  Connie didn’t speak.

  “You really screwed things up,” Max said.

  “You poor thing. Did I put you in a bad place?”

  “Yeah. Very bad. I’ve been struggling to reassure Louise.” Max turned back to face the woman. “It isn’t exactly easy.”

  “So why bother?”

  “Because she happens to be my wife and because we happen to have a kid—”

  “You’re so old-fashioned.” And Connie frowned, gazing past Max at some point on the wall.

  “Look, before you came along …” He let his sentence fade out. He felt wretched, uneasy, being here in this place with Connie, seeing her lie there with her knees upraised and her legs apart and her short skirt lifted up to her thighs. He also felt, in some other way, excited—such were the contradictions of The Big Dilemma. What was he supposed to do? He could bury himself between Connie’s legs and in that place all problems would, at least on a temporary basis, resolve themselves in a brief amnesia. He paced around the room, conscious of how her eyes followed him. He saw her stretch to the bedside table and find a cigarette, and her skirt rose up. He went back and took her in his arms.

  She moved out of his embrace. “I don’t want to ruin your marriage,” she said.

  “You could have fooled me.”

  “Seriously, Max.” Her voice was unusually solemn now, dry and serious in a way that surprised him.

  “If you don’t want to do a demolition number on my life, then why the hell are you here in Carnarvon?” he asked. Tell her to go, Max. Tell her it’s over. Finito. The End. His hand fell against her thigh.

  “What do you think of me, Max? I mean, what do you really think?”

  He smiled. “It keeps changing. It’s always in flux. I can’t answer that question properly. I think about you a lot of the time. Sometimes what I feel is downright dread. At other times there’s this intense longing for you.” He shrugged. It wasn’t a satisfactory answer to a somewhat unexpected question, but it was honest, the best he thought he could do.

  The girl got up from the bed and walked to the window, where she looked out for a time, smoking her cigarette. Max watched her. Without turning to him, she said, “I like you. I genuinely like you, Max. I’m not so sure I care so much for myself.…”

  Why was she so solemn?

  “I shouldn’t have come here,” she said.

  Max walked across the floor toward her.

  “It was wrong to come up here,” and she shook her head from side to side. “Look at the way I’m dressed, Max. The black mini-skirt. Those boots. Look at me. I feel like some kind of cheap hooker.”

  He placed his hands on her shoulders—why was she talking this way? Guilt? Second thoughts about their entire relationship? He didn’t understand the sudden change in her mood. When he’d first come through the door, everything had been different—the way she’d welcomed him, her provocation in lying back across the bed and kicking her boots off and touching herself, arousing him. But now. What was going on now?

  “I feel sorry for your wife,” she said.

  “Connie—”

  “This is a sham, Max. A fucking sham.”

  “What is?” Perplexed, he realized Connie was moving away from him yet again, slipping out from beneath his hands and going back across the room where she paused by the bed and swung her face around to look at him.

  “A sham,” he echoed. “I don’t understand.”

  “You’re not supposed to.”

  “Connie, you’re losing me.”

  “That’s the whole idea.”

  Max sighed, spread his hands out. “I was never good with conundrums, sweetheart.”

  Connie Harrison sat down, lit another cigarette. “I’m not a home wrecker, Max. It doesn’t come easy to me. Do you understand that? And what you called cunning a moment ago—that doesn’t come easy to me either, Max.”

  He nodded. There was a strange little lump in his throat and his mouth was very dry. He realized he wanted a drink. He went to the tiny refrigerator in the corner of the room, opened it, found a couple of miniatures of liquor. He snapped one of them open, without bothering to read the label, and he drank straight out of the small bottle. Rum. It smarted at the back of his throat. What the hell was Connie trying to tell him?

  “Maybe if you could spell this out for me,” he suggested. He tossed the empty miniature inside the wastebasket.

  Connie Harrison sighed. “It isn’t easy.”

  “Try.”

  “It’s been a lie from the beginning.”

  “What has?” Bewildered, Max sat down. He hated narrative of events that lost him, made him founder.

  “You. Me.” She had a Kleenex in one hand and she was crumpling it uneasily. “I genuinely thought I could go through with it. I thought it would be the simplest thing in the world.” She paused. Max stared at her.

  “I’m still in the dark,” he said. “I don’t know what you’re trying to tell me.”

  “What do you know about me, Max?”

  “You’re a graduate assistant at City College. English Department. You’re divorced—”

  “You know only what I told you.”

  “I didn’t go hire a private detective to check you out, Connie.” Max smiled weakly. Where was this leading anyhow?

  “Max,” she said. “I don’t even know where City College is! I couldn’t find it without a goddamn map, Max. And I’ve never been married. Lies, Max. Lies. One after the other. I made all that up.”

  “Why?”

  Connie Harrison moved to where he sat. She went down on her knees and took one of his hands, clasping it between her own, then laid her face against the side of his leg. He reached out to touch her hair. She’d lied—so what? He wasn’t altogether an innocent in that department himself. “You must have had a good reason—”

  “Yeah. The best,” she replied. “Only I can’t follow the whole thing through.”

  “Follow what?” Max asked. “What whole thing are you talking about?”

  Connie Harrison clutched the fabric of her black skirt. “I guess it happened when I saw your wife’s face in the restaurant. See, up until then, she’d been an abstraction. A name. I didn’t know what she looked like. And then I saw her and I guess that’s when it happened.…”

  Max raised his hands in exasperation. Around and around, going nowhere—what was she driving at? He felt a sense of slippage. Was she, in her own roundabout manner, telling him the whole thing was over just because she’d seen Louise? Was that it? He wasn’t sure what to feel, whether relief or pain.

  Connie opened the small refrig
erator and removed a can of ginger ale. She popped it open. She sipped a little, dabbed her lips with the Kleenex. “It paid well, that’s the best I can say about the whole thing.”

  Paid well? Max gripped her wrist. “What the hell are you talking about? Paid well? What is that supposed to mean?”

  “Money, Max. Cash.”

  “Money.”

  “The first payment was five hundred dollars. I needed cash. What does an out-of-work actress do, Max? I was waiting tables. I wanted out of that.”

  “Wait. Hold on.” Max let her arm go. An actress?

  “The second payment was another five hundred,” she said.

  Max shook his head from side to side. “Somebody gave you money—”

  “You got it. Somebody gave me money.”

  “For what?”

  Connie Harrison was very quiet. She looked at Max and he couldn’t tell if her expression were pity or regret or some other emotion he just couldn’t identify.

  “For what?” he asked again.

  “To sleep with you.”

  “You’re joking.”

  “I don’t have the kind of humor you’d call weird,” she said. “I’m not joking.”

  “I don’t see it. I don’t get it.”

  “Don’t ask me to explain it all Max, because I’m not sure I understand it myself. The guy said he wanted me to interfere with your marriage. Okay? He said he wanted the whole marriage shaken up. He said he needed to drive a wedge between you and your wife. He wanted the marriage … Look, I don’t remember the exact words he used.”

  “What guy?” Max asked.

  Connie didn’t answer the question. “A crisis. Something like that. He wanted a crisis in your marriage. Something that would cause chaos. Something to distract you and Louise. Listen, I didn’t stop to ask about his motives. I took the money and I performed my duties and I think I did that side of it pretty well.”

  “Who are you talking about, for God’s sake?”

  She crushed the aluminum can in her hand. “I can’t follow through, that’s the trouble. I’m supposed to go see Louise and tell her about our … affair. Specific details, dates and places—those are my instructions. Like I say, I can’t goddamn do it!”

  Max asked the question again. “What guy?”

  “Your tenant,” she answered this time. “The man who lives in your house.”

  Max was silent for a long time. A darkness crossed his mind, eclipsed his thoughts. He didn’t even hear Connie Harrison telling him how sorry she was, didn’t listen to the flow of her words, didn’t feel her hand as she laid it against the side of his face. Because nothing made sense. Nothing added up. Nothing computed. What faced him was an abacus whose beads kept slipping from the wires, making any calculation impossible.

  The girl had to be lying. That’s what it came down to. She had to be lying.

  He said so.

  Connie looked hurt. “Why would I make anything like that up, Max? I’ve told you the truth. I’ve told you everything. I could’ve gone on with the whole scheme. I could have gone to see your wife, the way he wanted me to. But I didn’t, did I? I didn’t have the heart for the rest of it.”

  “It doesn’t make any fucking sense,” Max said.

  Connie Harrison shrugged. “My feelings exactly.”

  “Why would Zmia want to … what were those words you used?”

  “Chaos. Distraction.”

  “Why would he want to introduce chaos into my life?” Max walked the room—his puzzlement had given way to a shapeless anger, something that lay unfocused inside him. He was angry with the girl for misleading him. Angry with himself. Angry with Zmia. And with the game, the strange game of deception that was going on. “Why would he want my marriage to be in a state of crisis?”

  Connie Harrison sat on the bed. “I’m sorry, Max.”

  “I bet you are.”

  “I don’t blame you for being angry.”

  Max went to the window, clenched his hands, raised them up to the pane. Why why why—he couldn’t bring himself to look at the woman now. All the things he’d ever said to her, all the intimacies they’d ever shared, these things made him feel utterly foolish, totally used. What was this strange alliance of Professor Zmia and Connie Harrison, waitress and unemployed actress?

  “How did Zmia find you?”

  “He came to the place where I was working,” she answered. “We got talking. He can be quite charming, you know. He came back a few times. One thing led to another. He knew I needed money.…” She put a hand to her mouth. “I thought I could be more cold-blooded than I am, Max.”

  “You’ve been cold-blooded enough,” he snapped at her.

  She smoothed her skirt over her thighs. “I don’t blame you for saying that. The trouble is, I started to like you. I was only instructed to seduce you. Liking you wasn’t part of the strategy.”

  “Strategy,” Max said, his voice filled with scorn. “I don’t see any goddamn reason for all this.”

  “Zmia didn’t mention any either. I can’t help you there.”

  “Goddamn it. Goddamn you and him.” Bluster, Max thought. Bluster and confusion and outrage. He felt as a laboratory animal might—led inside a labyrinth and manipulated by flashing lights, bells, and ultimate rewards. In this case, Connie Harrison’s willing body. But what kind of experiment was it intended to be? He slammed his hands together.

  What did Zmia want?

  The question went around and around in his mind, trapped there like a god-awful echo.

  “There’s one other thing,” Connie said. “I don’t know what it means exactly.”

  Max looked at her. What else could there be?

  “He asked me to make a delivery for him.”

  “A delivery?”

  “Yeah,” she said.

  He was silent. The tension inside him was intolerable.

  “It seemed perfectly harmless,” she said.

  “I’m listening.”

  Connie lit a cigarette.

  Then she told him.

  42

  Louise stepped inside the house. She was thinking about Frog still, the way she’d been thinking about him all the way back through the forest. She went inside the kitchen, heated up some old coffee, sat at the table. Distracted, she wondered about the photograph Frog had mentioned.

  There was, so she thought, an easy explanation. If the Summers hadn’t taken it themselves, then obviously Dennis had given it to them. Didn’t that make good sense?

  Yes, of course.

  Provided the kid had brought his own picture here from San Francisco.

  She closed her eyes. She couldn’t remember.

  Why would Dennis carry a photograph of himself all the way up here? Why would he stash such a thing in his luggage? She couldn’t remember ever seeing a photograph. Besides, like any number of kids his age, he was never exactly enamored of having his picture taken and usually did so only under duress. He never expressed much of an interest in the finished result, either, so why would he carry a picture in his luggage? Dammit.

  Frog wasn’t well. Maybe he only thought he’d seen such a thing. She worried about him. On her second cup of coffee, she decided she’d talk to Max about him. Maybe he’d go up through the forest and examine the man. If he could be bothered.

  Louise moved out into the hallway. From the foot of the stairs she called Max’s name. There wasn’t an answer. She called a second time.

  And then she remembered. In her preoccupation, her absentmindedness, she hadn’t really absorbed the fact that the Volvo wasn’t in the driveway, which meant Max had gone out, which meant—as far as she was concerned—Carnarvon.

  Which meant—that girl. The Huckleberry Inn. Yes, she thought. That’s where. She tried not to be calm. Carnarvon. Connie Harrison.

  She drained her coffee. She smoked a couple of cigarettes in quick succession. Don’t think about it. Don’t let your imagination run riot. Be good and calm and take it easy! Do something to keep yourself occupied
!

  What does any housewife do at a time like this, Louise?

  They clean, don’t they? They look for busywork, which is said to be good for the soul, don’t they?

  She stepped into Dennis’s room. The boy had forgotten to remove the jar of Dick Summer’s bait, as she’d known he would. At least it was stoppered, so the smell in the room wasn’t altogether unbearable, but the sight of the maggots clinging to the inside of the jar upset her. She moved toward it. She couldn’t quite bring herself to handle the thing.

  Sighing, she sat down on the edge of the boy’s unmade bed. She didn’t have the energy to do anything. She shut her eyes and hugged herself and wondered what she could do to fight off the loneliness that assailed her.

  This place. This empty house. And then there was Frog, sick but refusing to admit it. Christ, why had they ever come to this place? She wept. It was sudden, a quick collapse, a few tears which she wiped against the cuff of her shirt. She dried her eyes, smiled, tried to shake the mood out of herself. Who needs this?

  Not you, Louise.

  Everything is going to be … fine.

  She gazed around the kid’s room. Crumpled shirts, discarded jeans, socks—everything lay in casual disarray. Would he ever learn to pick up after himself? She moved from the bed, gathered up some clothing, whistled to herelf. Inducing cheer, she thought. Welcome to this empty house.

  She paused. She listened to the silences. She whistled again. How did it all go so wrong?

  Not that way, Louise. Think bluebirds and sunshine and nice summery days.

  She stopped by the bedside table. She picked up the photograph of Dick and Charlotte and stared at the gown Charlotte was wearing. It was identical to the one she’d been dancing in. What did it all mean? This repetition of clothing. This honeymoon they apparently planned. What did all that mean?

  The photograph. Louise turned it over in her hand and wondered how long ago it had been taken. She studied the photographer’s name imprinted on the back of the picture, then she stared once more at the faces of Dick and Charlotte Summer. There was, she thought, a dark kind of beauty about Charlotte, and yet it was somehow touched with a sadness, an indefinable sorrow. And Dick’s smile, even though it suggested cheerfulness, seemed more than just a little forced, as if he’d had to hold that expression a long time.